Interesting. I suspect there's a possibility of a few high valued transactions skewing statistics like that a bit. Certainly I've seen some houses in Richmond going very quickly, but others have not sold for months or have been sold and then the transaction has fallen through and they're back on the market. There are houses in the area on sale for below £200K which also sell quickly, and which don't really look like the kind of places people would want as holiday homes, so I think local first-time buyers are still a fairly big part of the market.
We ended up talking to two estate agents, the second of whom seemed much better than the other (and also valued the house £50K higher than the other, which I assume was purely to win the business). They had the house up on rightmove on a Tuesday afternoon, we had a number of viewings lined up for Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, but the lady who looked round first made an offer above the asking price, on the condition that we cancel the other viewings, and we accepted, so it was sold within 12 hours of going on the market. So it seems like the market here is pretty hot too. Seems like the buyer is in a hurry, as her own sale is at the point where they're ready to exchange contracts. So, fingers crossed it all goes smoothly from here.
We need to open a joint bank account to hold the cash proceeds for however long the gap between buying and selling turns out to be. Splitting it across multiple accounts for FSCS protection is going to be too painful I think, so National Savings might be an obvious choice, but I'm not sure if they're set up for big electronic payments and extra security.